Davide Bennato, Ph.D. in Communication Sciences, is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication and Sociology of Digital Media at the Department of Humanistic Sciences of the University of Catania. He is one of the founding members and past vice president (2005/08) of STS Italia (the Italian Society for Social Studies of Science and Technology). He is member of the board of professors of the Ph.D. in Complex Systems for Physical, Socio-economic and Life Sciences (Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Catania), member of the board of the CINUM – Centro di Informatica Umanistica (Digital Humanities Center) (Department of Humanistic Sciences of the University of Catania).
He is also member of the board of Bench s.r.l., a University of Catania spin off in social and marketing research with a computational social science approach.
His research topics are collective behaviors in social media, big data ethics, computational social science, relationships between technology and values, science and technology communications models on the internet.
His books are: Le metafore del computer. La costruzione sociale dell’informatica (The computer metaphors. The social construction of the computer science, 2002), Sociologia dei media digitali (Sociology of digital media, 2011), Il computer come macroscopio. Big data e approccio computazionale per comprendere i cambiamenti sociali e culturali (The computer as macroscope. Big data and computational approach for the understanding of social and cultural changes, 2015).
Some of his most recent papers: (2014) The Open Laboratory: Limits and Possibilities of Using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube as a Research Data Source (with F. Giglietto and L. Rossi), (2014) Etica dei Big data. Le conseguenze sociali della raccolta massiva di informazioni (Big data ethics. Social consequences of the massive data collection) , (2015) Morte di un’icona pop. Le reazioni online alla morte di Michael Jackson (The death of a pop icon. Online reaction to the death of Michael Jackson), (2016) Il rischio della datafrenia nell’analisi dei big data (The risk of the dataphrenia in the big data analysis)
He wrote about his research topics in his scientific blog: Tecnoetica.it (in italian).